iPhoto ‘09 - Overview

I have to say, I’m very impressed with iPhoto ‘09.

“Faces” has been added to iPhoto as a way to organize and tag your photos. Once you’ve started assigning names to photos, it automatically “recognizes” photos with those other people, and labels them accordingly. Facial recognition is something I’ve seen in other software, but to see it added into iLife/iPhoto is nice.

When you have a new photo or an unidentified photo, it pops up a “corkboard” that shows the faces for people you’ve already named and suggests matches for the new/unidentified photo.

“Places” has also been added as a way to organize and tag your photos. While they emphasized the geotag aspects (GPS coordinates added to a photo’s EXIF information by your camera), it’s also handy to manually do it, and it plots out your photos on maps.

They’ve also added a “Travel Books” feature where you can have books printed out with maps and photos of the places you visited or are interested.

Both of these features could end up being very useful to genealogists in the long run. I have my doubts about how accurate the facial recognition will be when it comes to older or smaller photos, but even if you have to do some manually, it seems like a good way to keep track of everything.

MemoryMiner 1.0.6

GroupSmarts, LLC has released MemoryMiner 1.0.6. MemoryMiner is a Mac OS X appliaction (Mac OS X 10.4.3+/Universal Binary) that allows you to use photos as “individual frames in a type of endless story board. The story elements are linked to each other by way of annotation layers identifying the people, places, dates and events captured in each frame. As links are made, it becomes easy and tremendously interesting to explore the threads which link people’s lives across time, place and shared experience.”

The only change in 1.0.6 was to “Adjust map downloading code to keep up with changes in the Mapquest web site.”

MemoryMiner 1.0.5

MemoryMiner 1.0.5 has been released by GroupSmarts, LLC. It’s a Mac OS X appliaction (Mac OS X 10.4.3+/Universal Binary) that allows you to use photos as “individual frames in a type of endless story board. The story elements are linked to each other by way of annotation layers identifying the people, places, dates and events captured in each frame. As links are made, it becomes easy and tremendously interesting to explore the threads which link people’s lives across time, place and shared experience.”

Changes: (via MacUpdate.com)
* Adds some enhancements.
* Corrects some problems with the XML Export.
* Has a newer Flash skin with support for displaying attached files and URLs.

MemoryMiner 1.04

MemoryMiner 1.04 is out, and it’s a very interesting piece of software. The developer’s do a much better job of describing it than I could: At its core, are a simple set of tools for treating photos (particularly rare, “pre-digital” photos) as individual frames in a type of endless story board. The story elements are linked to each other by way of annotation layers identifying the people, places, dates and events captured in each frame. As links are made, it becomes easy and tremendously interesting to explore the threads which link people’s lives across time, place and shared experience.

Definitely a piece of Mac OS X software that may interest some genealogists.

Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.3+ and it is a Universal Binary

Changes:
* New Flash player that can be used to present media exported from MemoryMiner on the web
* Localization in French, German, Italian, Danish, Japanese and Traditional Chinese
* Numerous usability enhancements and bug fixes

MapMemo 2.5

Mapmemo 2.5 is available. Mapmemo is an application that allows you to drag a file or folder onto maps, charts, photos - basically graphic/image files, and then associates that file/folder with that place/location on the graphic file by creating an alias. That alias will launch the proper application associated with that file.

For a genealogist, it could be very useful if you wanted to look at migrations or locations, and wanted to associate files with a certain geographic location. As far as maps, you can use your own, maps off the internet, an exported map (such as Route 66), historical maps, etc.

Requires: Mac OS X 10.3+

Changes:
* Universal Application and also runs on Intel-Macs in native mode.
* MapMemo files can now be browsed by Apple’s Spotlight search.
* There are new layer-functionalities and also some bug-fixes.

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